The Outcomes Book: Debate and Consensus after the WPA Outcomes Statement

The WPA Outcomes Statement represents a working consensus among composition scholars about what college students should learn and do in a composition program. But as a single-page document, the statement cannot convey the kind of reflective process that a writing program must undertake to address the learning outcomes described. The Outcomes Book relates the fuller process by exploring the matrix of concerns that surrounded the developing statement itself, and by presenting the experience of many who have since employed it in their own settings. For departments, programs, and individuals, this collection levers the Outcomes Statement in all its simplicity and complexity into a rich discussion of the programmatic essentials of writing theory and pedagogy--and what these look like at writing programs informed by the Outcomes Statement. It is written in the hope that faculty and administrators alike will use the Statement as a tool for cyclically reflecting on their own programs and practice.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1153/thumbnail.jp

Scully and Me: Or, The X-Files, Revisited

This essay reflects on the longevity of The X-Files phenomenon through the lens, primarily, of gender. The common interpretation of the two agents\u27 roles as reversing traditional male/female stereotypes--Scully, the female, is rational, while the male Mulder is imaginative--has never seemed particularly right to me, especially when one throws Scully\u27s Catholicism into the mix. Rather, it seems that, throughout the series, two belief systems come into conflict; while Mulder\u27s appears privileged because of his gender, the show subtly critiques that privilege through its portrayal of Scully\u27s Catholicism.(I suppose this essay is, in a way, an attempt to figure out what\u27s been bugging me about this show all these years.

Composition, Rhetoric and Disciplinarity: Traces of the Past, Issues of the Moment, and Prospects for the Future

Elizabeth Boquet is a contributing author (with Rita Malencyzk and Neal Lerner), ’Bunch of Nice Friends’: Bruffee and the Making of Knowledge in Writing Program Administration. Book description: Edited by four nationally recognized leaders of composition scholarship, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity asks a fundamental question: can Composition and Rhetoric, as a discipline, continue its historical commitment to pedagogy without sacrificing equal attention to other areas, such as research and theory? In response, contributors to the volume address disagreements about what it means to be called a discipline rather than a profession or a field; elucidate tensions over the defined breadth of Composition and Rhetoric; and consider the roles of research and responsibility as Composition and Rhetoric shifts from field to discipline. Outlining a field with a complex and unusual formation story, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity employs several lenses for understanding disciplinarity—theory, history, labor, and pedagogy—and for teasing out the implications of disciplinarity for students, faculty, institutions, and Composition and Rhetoric itself. Collectively, the chapters speak to the intellectual and embodied history leading to this point; to questions about how disciplinarity is, and might be, understood, especially with regard to Composition and Rhetoric; to the curricular, conceptual, labor, and other sites of tension inherent in thinking about Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline; and to the implications of Composition and Rhetoric’s disciplinarity for the future.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/english-books/1079/thumbnail.jp